Month: March 2010

If there is one thing that we should teach ourselves as we grow older, it should be when and how to slow down.

Think

Slowing down gives us time to think. More importantly, slowing down should give us time to reflect on what really matters before we dive in to something that we might regret later if we hasted.

Consider buying a bed for instance. For most of us, we think of the bed as that furniture in the house where we could rest, read a book and then fall sleep in. For those of us who are used to living comfortably, the bed is a basic necessity. We take it for granted so much that we don’t even realize how, more or less, 33% of our lives are actually spent in the bed (do the Math: 8hrs of sleep / 24hrs per day = 0.33).

So, if you’d consider buying a bed, you could think of it as a way to fill one of your basic needs, or you could think of it as a lifetime investment where you’d want to spend around 33% of your life in. The former could bring you to haste, but the latter is a fact that you should never turn your head away from. If one should buy a bed because it is needed, it helps to slow down and think! Regardless of the urgency, don’t hurry! Think about the bed’s value in your life and you’d be wiser to get the best bed that you might even love to use for the rest of your life.

Act

Slowing down gives us time to react right. More importantly, slowing down allows you to do the right thing that would work for you and that might even be good for everyone else close to you.

Consider re-designing your house’s kitchen… with an assured sky’s the limit budget! You may be tempted to fill it with lots of beautifully crafted cabinets, tiles, granites and state-of-the-art appliances. You’d do anything for the glory of your new kitchen. It’s what everyone desires. Your friends are going to drool with delight over it. It’s going to be lovely! The pride of your house for generations to come…

But think about this: unless that kitchen is your life, like when you’re a chef, a baker or a full pledged mom cooking for a family of 6 or 12, you would actually average only 1 to 2 hours in that beautiful kitchen everyday (perhaps a quarter or half of that in the morning and then the remainder at night). That’s only around 5% – 8% of your life. And if you’re not really hosting a regular house party of sorts, most of the time, that kitchen would be enjoyed only by you and you alone.

So if you’re planning to re-design that kitchen, upgrade (or downgrade) to the simplest kitchen needs that would suit spending less than 10% of your life for. It doesn’t have to be cheap, but it pays to slow down and to end up doing the right thing! Don’t over do yourself. Keep to the basics and spend only for what your kitchen is worth to you.

Follow ThroughIf you take time to think and you slow down to do the right thing, you can reserve resources to follow through. Consider that best bed you got for yourself, for example. It’s probably not the cheapest, but now you are ensured of a comfortable sleep for the rest of your life — well at least 33% of it. You’d love it so much that you might buy the best expensive comforters, blankets and pillows to compliment it. It would be no problem at all! You can afford them all, of course. Do you know why? Simple: because you didn’t spend everything on your kitchen…

Stones and paints; wood and carves; paper and ink… historical mediums to store knowledge and wisdom. They’ve stood the test of time. They taught us about our past. They taught us what we know.

Now, imagine a time when everything is digital — when all information are stored in digital storage mediums… when everything should be shared digitally.

Then imagine that electricity suddenly disappears… completely… for some reason.

How do you retrieve all those knowledge and wisdom kept in hard/flash drives and CDs? How do you even prove that digital civilization existed? What’s there to learn from them? What did they have? What did they do? What happened?

It’s like, once upon a time, a digital civilization existed and the generations of that time couldn’t even prove themselves. Then it becomes a myth… a legend. Eventually, none of them would be remembered. A civilization lost in history… forever.